Why are you a leading contributor in the SugarCRM community? What are the benefits that you experience from your involvement?

We loved SugarCRM from the very first moment so we decided to offer solutions based on Sugar to our customers. We thought the best way to introduce our projects outside of our local market and advertise our expertise was to create something useful on SugarForge.

What other projects have you been involved with on SugarForge.org?

DolceVita is a SugarCRM Community Edition Virtual Appliance that is available in English and Italian. It was developed using rPath'srBuilder platform and is deployable on VMWare, Citrix XenServer, Virtual Iron and Amazon EC2.

What inspired you to create this project?

Several months ago, we considered introducing Thin Clients (VDI) to our customers and wanted to offer a suite of enterprise web applications in order to install the bare minimum on the customers' site. Naturally, SugarCRM represented one of our choices, while Gmail together with Google Apps for your Domain was a possible candidate for email. At the time, we had no offering around an integration between SugarCRM and any email web applications (now we also have Zimgar - an integration between Zimbra and SugarCRM) and therefore we decided to create one: a GMail-SugarCRM integration.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

Our aim was to allow complete access to enterprise applications through a web browser and, more specifically, the integration of those web applications.

Is there anything that the users should know about? Something hidden/new in this project? Think of this as an opportunity to describe how it works to a user.

We developed DolceGmail to be as simple as possible and similar to applications already on the market. Since it's a Firefox Add-on, the source code is based on XUL and Javascript, and contains of some code from Asertiva. By the way, we would like to thank the guys from Asertiva for the excellent job they have done.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

The best way to understand if you're on the right track is to contribute to the community. The success that we saw from the DolceGMail project was a pleasant surprise for us. This made us realize that we should keep investing our time and resources in it. Moreover, we have had more results and contacts from abroad during the first two weeks of DolceGMail than the six previous months.

What do you want to build next for Sugar Suite?

We would like to integrate SugarCRM with some GIS extensions. The market already offers very good products that use maps, but we have already developed an application totally based on Open Source projects for GPS mobile tracking that we would like to integrate it into Sugar soon.